“Ye shall be as gods,” the serpent promised. We all know the story from Genesis -- how Adam and Eve were tempted, and how they fell, sparking the eternal struggle of good versus evil embedded in each human soul. And this longing to be as gods, to be the object of one’s own idolatry, has bedeviled mankind forever after. That siren call resonates today, especially in the growing extremes of progressive ideology. Some call this extreme ideology secularism, but it feels more like a religion, akin to paganism.
Young people from the late 1960s on rebelled against the tradition-bound world of their parents, which they felt offered no respite from the threat of nuclear annihilation, a seemingly pointless foreign war, and the soulless “materialism” of modern life. These charges against the previous generation, whose own lives were demarcated by the Great Depression and World War II, left parents especially puzzled and distraught. And so, the hippie phenomenon began, the personal, political and revolutionary rending of society into a chasm between two divergent worlds. This rending is chronicled in the current film, Jesus Revolution.
The main story relates how one small Southern California church, Calvary Chapel, came to expand into a megachurch in the late ‘60s. One day Janette Smith, Calvary pastor Chuck Smith’s daughter, picks up a hippie hitchhiking down Coast Highway. She is at odds with her parents and their religion, like so many young people. The hitchhiker, Lonnie Frisbee, also a preacher, wins over Janette, and soon the elder Smiths, with his religious fire. One day Chuck decides to give Lonnie a chance to preach, and he wows the congregation, with several of Lonnie’s hippie followers in attendance. Word of this new preacher spreads, the hippies descend upon the small church, and the rest is history. The newly invigorated Calvary Chapel fills to the brim with joyful, loud, idealistic hippies -- a disconcerting development for the staid congregation -- and today the church has branches and allied churches throughout the world.
But the film is more than the history of a particular denomination; Jesus Revolution speaks to how today’s mad liberation culture began. In many ways, that journey has been hijacked, perhaps even instigated, by those of a revolutionary bent who see Western Civilization and Christianity as evil and who promise a utopia without limits as an alternative. “Turn on, tune in, drop out!” is the modern iteration of the serpent’s promise. But this time, personal enlightenment is not the goal; this time it’s just raw power. As we can see in the movie, and in our society today, this was as false a promise as the one whispered in the Garden.
The explosion of drug use of the 1960s is well documented. Some youth just wanted to get high, and some sought a higher understanding of the universe. Even the original countercultural guru Timothy Leary used to say that LSD was a search for God. In a way, it was, yet many ended up harmed by bad trips or dismayed when real life reappeared after a good trip ended. Harder drugs like cocaine and heroin soon were offered by enterprising dealers everywhere, and addiction resulted. Today, most drug use is de facto legal. Bowing to political pressure, many states legalized marijuana, while others have minimal penalties, and hard drugs like opioids and methamphetamine and fentanyl are openly sold and used on our city streets. Look at the encampments in any major city center and you will see open drug dealing and use, the squalor instead of utopia that was promised by legalized drug use. And of course the mortality rates today from drug addiction, a leading cause of death of the young, continue to soar.
Feminism too underwent radical changes from the 1960s onward. Today, the original demands for equal pay and equal opportunity have hardened into an absolutist anti-male, anti-family cause. The legal barriers that used to limit women, whether it be a career choice or wage equality or motherhood or all of the above, are largely gone. But today feminism remains discontented: politicians mandate female participation in every sector of society; and motherhood itself is marginalized. Abortion rights, too, as part of the feminist insistence on bodily autonomy, have expanded since the ‘60s. At that time abortion was legal in early pregnancy in a few states, only if necessary for the health of the mother. By 1992, President Bill Clinton and the Democrat Party advocated for “safe, legal, and rare” abortions. That language, however, was expunged from the Democratic platform in 2012, and a new standard of abortion at any point in pregnancy became the standard. The Supreme Court nationalized abortion rights in Roe v. Wade in 1973, which decision stood until a new Court returned the issue to the states in 2022, triggering violent protests and even intimidation of Supreme Court justices.
The modern environmental movement began after the Santa Barbara oil spill and the fire on Lake Erie’s oily surface, in 1970. Twenty million people marched to protest the ruination of our land on the first Earth Day. And that aspect of the movement ushered in an age of legislative and bureaucratic diktat, which did clean up many messes, but now is also ratifying trivial, punitive measures like “green” toilets and dishwashers, or like citing and fining homeowners who dare to build on land the EPA claims it regulates. It must be noted, however, that after decades of regulation, lawfare, and spending, the federal Superfund established in 1980 to clean up polluted sites across the country has remediated less than a third of them. We now see that many left leaning activists, fresh from victory in ending the Vietnam War, saw the movement as a chance to control the economy, the latest iteration of that principle as expressed by a congresswoman’s chief of staff., so perhaps cleaning up spills was not the green movement’s core mission.
Finally, we must consider the movement’s stance towards the West in general. The workers’ socialist revolution has never materialized, and socialists have grappled for a hundred years to understand why. Force and rioting have not destroyed civilized society yet, nor has the promotion of drug use, destruction of the family, nor the entire “long march through the institutions.” The working class still prefers its traditional culture, so the left has given up on them. But who then will replace them?
Leftist philosophers like Herbert Marcuse have always believed that the lowest classes are the revolutionary classes, and today’s so-called “homeless” play that part. We have spent billions of dollars on various programs, yet nothing actually solves “homelessness.” When we see mayor after mayor across America adopt the failed measures of cities that have already botched their own “homeless” situation, like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, we can cautiously ask if the failure is intentional. Perhaps the socialists have sparked a slow motion instead of a violent working-class revolution, a widespread, creeping societal destruction from the bottom up. The streets of major cities are filled with addicts, mentally ill, and simply criminal people, to the ruin of the health and safety of a city’s residents. The “homeless” are content to collaborate as long as they are fed and clothed and enjoy the liberation from rules that the modern progressive city allows them.
And so, the film is more than just an historical account of the Jesus Movement. I went to see Jesus Revolution because I lived through it. As an art student in those days, I leaned toward the hippie side. I had to pay rent, though, and abhorred the idea of a commune, so that kept me safely “square” and sober. And soon I began to see the toll exacted by the hippie lifestyle. I had friends lost in clouds of sweet smoke and white powder, people I cared about diving into the free and easy scene ending up poor, addicted, and heartbroken. Or dead.
Disillusioned, poor, and heartbroken, many of the early hippies turned to Calvary Chapel and churches like it. They must have realized that there is no escape from the limits of human nature, and all their much-vaunted freedom to be “as gods” resulted in enslavement instead: to drugs, sexual excess, excitement. Today’s madly careening liberation culture continues the death spiral.
So where does this revolution end? The movie suggests that the road back must be religion, Christianity here, with its core tenet in the sanctity of the individual as a child of God and God’s subject as well. Notice I did not say “belief.” I believe that even non-believers must live as if they believed, if they are to contribute to the bolstering of the republic, and of Western Civilization itself. The present morass is testimony to the poisoned fruit of that other choice, absolute liberation from any constraint whatsoever.
At one point in the movie, Kay Smith, the pastor’s wife, counsels him as he despairs of spreading the gospel. She advises patience: “The truth is quiet, but the lies are loud.”
The frenzied pursuit of freedom from all law, reason, any iteration of a deity, or even reality itself, to become “as gods” — that’s what today’s extreme ideology is about. And that promise was a lie in the Garden of Eden and is still a lie -- and these days it’s louder than ever.